Dr. Steven Block has been in private practice in Gastroenterology in Lubbock, TX since 1994 and is now proudly continuing his practice with the West Texas Digestive Disease Center. He is a native West Texan who grew up in Muleshoe, TX and graduated from Muleshoe High School in 1974. He and his wife, Melba, have three beautiful children, two sons and a daughter.
Their family has grown to include two lovely daughter-in-laws and one wonderful, very busy granddaughter. His hobbies include activities with his family such as thru-hiking, fishing, hunting, skiing and traveling. Some of the more notable family activities he has had have included hunting for caribou in Alaska and completing a three-week thru-hike with his sons on the John Muir Trail in California.
His additional education includes graduating from medical school in 1982 from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, TX. After graduating from medical school he completed his Internal Medicine Residency and Gastroenterology Fellowship training with the Air Force at Wilford Hall Medical Center located at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, TX.
He is also board certified by the American Board of Internal Medicine in both Internal Medicine and Gastroenterology. In the Air Force he was stationed overseas twice, in the Philippines at Clark Air Force Base and at Wiesbaden Air Force Base in Germany.
As an Air Force veteran he served in the Air Force as a medical officer for over ten years and was honorably discharged from the Air Force with the rank of major. Other medical accomplishments he has achieved include being a physician inventor.
He invented a peripheral vascular clotting stent called a vascular occluding bridged selfexpanding metal stent (VOBSEMS). He holds the patent on the VOBSEMS, patent number 10,265,076 B2 with the date of issue on the patent being April 23, 2019. Finally, he believes as T.S. Eliot once wrote, "We shall not cease from exploration, And the end of all our exploring, Will be to arrive where we started, And know the place for the first time."